Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

So you’ve never made mead before, or you’re curious what it is.

Mead is an ancient drink, with three basic components: water, yeast, and honey. In the grand scheme of things, mead is more closely related to wine than things like beer, cider, or hard alcohol.

Some fancier names for some fancier things. All variations below take the three simple ingredients and twists them(some slightly, others more so).

Traditional - water, honey, yeast. The bog standard, it’s a classic. It’s also delicious.

Metheglin - water, honey, yeast, herbs. This might be a weird Welsh word bastardization from which the word medicine derives. I haven’t bothered to dig deeper, but I like the story.

Melomel - water, honey, yeast, fruit. This is another very popular variety of mead. Fruit additions bring with them their own fun things, and can possibly contaminate a brew. Some like to add them in primary, some in secondary.

Pyment - water, honey, yeast, grape juice. Or maybe no water at all. This is what happens when wine and mead have a baby.

Braggot - water, honey, yeast, wort (the fermentable sugars made in beer making). I have not made this variation personally, so I will defer to others’ knowledge.

Acerglyn - water, honey, yeast, maple syrup. Some of the honey is removed, and replaced with maple syrup.

Bochet - water, caramelized honey, yeast. This is accomplished by heating the honey and boiling it. This does change some of the sugars into unfermentable ones.

Capsicumel - water, honey, yeast, chili(s). I really like this one because it’s just kind of a weird flavor to me. Spicy drink!

Cyser - water, honey, yeast, apple juice. This replaces some or all of the water for apple juice. Like if a cider and a mead had a baby.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, just getting a party started. In fact, you can mix and match and make a crazy sounding thing like a cyser bochet. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what you want to brew. Speaking of.

Honey Varietals

There’s so many varietals of honey it’s truly bananas.

There’s clover, wildflower, orange blossom, mesquite, blueberry, raspberry. The list is truly spectacular. For the bulk of my recipes I use orange blossom honey. It’s a very pleasant flavor, and the only traditional mead I’ve really enjoyed.

Making Mead

A comfy list of things with which to brew mead: 1-2 fermenting carboy (or one carboy and a pitcher, whatever will hold a gallon (4L)of water, and can be sanitized). A bung An airlock Honey Water Yeast(I use Lalvin 71b for most things). Yeast nutrient (GoFerm, Fermaid O, Fermaid K) Sanitizer Racking wand Hydrometer - if possible have a second, they are fragile. Graduated cylinder for the hydrometer. Some kind of pipette / wine thief. Corks Hand held cork press Bottles - five one liter bottles for a one gallon recipe, just in case.

The process: Always sanitize everything, as per your sanitizer’s rules.

Honey in fermenter.

Water in fermenter, shake it all up. This accomplishes a few things. It puts the honey in suspension so the yeast can eat it, and puts some oxygen into the mix so the yeast can do their part.

Take a measurement. Nearly fill your cylinder using your wine thief, and (CAREFULLY) set in your hydrometer. It should read around 1.100 if you’re going along with the recipe at the bottom.

Pitch the yeast in (there’s a cool thing called GoFerm, follow those packet instructions if you went that route).

Bung in carboy, sanitizer in airlock, airlock in bung, carboy in a dark space. This is called primary fermentation.

Wait, measure every 5-7 days. Sanitize your thief and cylinder and hydrometer, steal, fill, measure.

If you’re using yeast nutrient, add it at each 1/3 of sugar consumption.

Fermentation is complete when your hydrometer reads 1.000 or lower. This means that the fermentable sugars have all been consumed by the yeast. It takes roughly two weeks to reach this stage, but there’s a buttload of variables in your environment.

You should see a pile of blech at the bottom of the carboy. The fancy name for this is lees (pronounced like lease).

This is the step that got me in trouble. You need to sanitize a second vessel (can be a carboy, bucket, or jug, depending on the size you’re brewing). Use the racking wand to transfer the mead (called racking) to the second vessel to get it off the lees.

Repeat step 5. This is secondary fermentation.

Now the long haul. Wait. The longer you wait, the better it gets. The flavors all kind of melt together. I find that after about 6 months things stop tasting “hot,” then you move on to bottling.

There’s a thing about clear mead being best. I don’t particularly care, or use any fining agents to make it clear. Most meads clear with time unless they’re super fruit laden.

Most racking wands come with a bottling attachment. Sanitize bottles, use the bottling wand to put the mead in the bottles, and cork away.

Note: this will be an unsweet mead if you bottle it at this point.

Backsweetening:

This is a slightly unfun area. You have a problem. You’ve racked your mead, you’ve taken it off the lees. It’s clear, it’s ready for bottling. But it needs to be sweeter.

There’s still some yeast in there, and adding more sugar might just make them wake back up and kick us back to primary fermentation.

In a sealed vessel, this can be a pressure bomb.

So, we need to make sure that: the yeast are truly dead and gone, or they cannot eat the sugars we’re back sweetening with.

Ways to stop the yeast: Potassium Sorbate. This stops the yeast from dividing.

Campden Tablets. These are sulfites that prevent acetic acid (vinegar) or wild yeast that can spoil the wine.

I use both in conjunction because, well, bottle bombs are scary. I can add links but the two from brewer supply company have instructions on them.

A filter. There’s a fancy weird micron filter thing that I haven’t personally messed with, but I’ve heard that it may be able to filter out the yeast? I’m not entirely sure, I’ll leave it for someone else’s knowledge.

Figuring out how much honey to add requires some math. There’s dry mead from 0.099 to 1.006 Medium goes from 1.006 to 1.015 Sweet goes from 1.0015 to 1.020 And dessert is anything higher than that.

Now for the math! Honey is 35 pts/lb/gal. So if your mead is 1.000 and you would like it to be 1.011, you need to get how many points you need. So 1.011 - 1.000 You need 11 gravity points. Divide 11 by 35 That gets you 0.31 pounds per gallon of water. So, if it’s a five gallon batch, you’d need to add 1.5 pounds of honey after stabilizing.

So, stabilize as per directions (most also want a 24 hour delay for efficacy). Add the requisite amount of honey. Gently mix, and bottle / leave to age some more.

The bare minimum setup:

1 gallon of spring water in its own container 3 pounds of honey Bread yeast A glove

The container that the water comes in should be sanitized from its own manufacturing, just make sure it’s a new container with the seal intact.

Pour out some of the spring water (enough to fit all the honey in). Shake the crap out of it. Poke a hole in the glove’s tip to let the CO2 escape and pray nothing creeps in. There are other ideas for home made airlocks, I’d trust a blow off tube more than this. This is just the absolute minimum to get a brew going. Wait for awhile, carefully pour it off the lees after about a month (you’re not measuring to see when fermentation is complete). Cap the container instead of glove it. Wait some more time (still about six months). Pour it into a glass, and enjoy.

First Mead:

~1 gallon of water. 3 pounds of orange blossom honey Yeast of choice

Other bits, bobs, and explainers:

1. Why yeast nutrient? Honey is kinda naturally anti-microbial growth, and we want to have microbial growth. The yeast nutrient helps our little bugs eat all the sugar. I’ve heard from various people that they can tell when the yeast had a hard time.

2. What’s with adding the nutrient in bits, can’t you just do it all at once?

You can add it all in at once, I’ve done it, the problem with that is they’ll use it all up, blow up their population, and then go back to struggle bus to ferment the rest of it.

3. How do you keep track of all this stuff?

To be honest, I have a Google sheet of brews going currently and brews that are completed. I can add an image of it in future.

I’ll add more answers as people have questions. This is a general guide, and I’m just a hobbyist.

Edit: some bits are janky, I’ll fix it in a bit when I’m at my actual computer.

Greetings! Here's my attempt at creating an introduction to beer brewing. Please feel free to point out errors, inaccuracies, missing info, or anything you feel should be different.

Disclaimer: written under the influence of homebrew

Ingredients

• Yeast

In its most basic form, alcoholic fermentation is just yeasts chomping away at sugars to generate alcohol and carbon dioxide, giving our favourite beverage the buzz and fizz we enjoy. Depending on yeast strain and conditions (temperature, OG - that is initial or original gravity of the wort, nutrient availability), it may be more or less potent (in terms of alcohol tolerance) or yield more or less flavour compounds. Yeast suppliers usually give datasheets with temperature ranges and alcohol tolerances for yeasts.

• Malt

Malt is just grain that has been coerced into sprouting then dried. This unlocks enzymes within the grain that cut up complex sugars (starch) stored inside the grain into simpler sugars that the seedling would use as its initial energy stores. The drying conditions of the malt are what give us the large selection we have today. Do note, however, that the darker the malt, the less enzymatic activity it has.

• Hops

The main preservative in beer - hops inhibit lactobacilli that turn beer sour and give it the aroma we all know and love. Hops are defined by their alpha-acid content, which turn into beta-acids (that give beer its hop bitter taste) during boiling. The time of addition for hops is key for this, as longer boiling yields more beta-acids but loses flavour from the hops - hence, bittering hops are boiled for longer, aroma hops are boiled for less or not at all - added at whirlpool or used to dry-hop. Hops are also sensitive to oxidation, so they're stored in the freezer and sold in vacuum-sealed bags. There is a plethora of hops available from any self-respecting homebrew store and hop pellets (ground up and compressed hop flowers) are by far the most common form.

• Water

Without going into much detail, brewing water should not be overlooked. The ionic content of water does influence your beer quite a lot (for instance due to pH or presence / absence of magnesium ions that may bring out hop bitterness). Historically, brewing water has been tied to specific styles (like dry irish stout in Dublin, IPAs in Burton-on-trent or pilsners in Pilsen). Water used for brewing must, however, be chlorine-free, in order to avoid unpleasant flavours. This can be accomplished by using 1-2 campden tablets to 20L (~5 gal) water or filtering your water throught activated charcoal before use.

Process

0. Sanitizing

The most important step in brewing - sanitizing stuff. Everything that does not get heated to at least pasteurization temperatures (~71 C or 161 F) needs to be sanitized. Everything that touches the wort after it's cooled or fermented beer needs to be sanitized. This cannot be stressed enough. Using StarSan diluted to its specification for about 30 seconds usually does the job. If something was sanitized and it touches something that was not, it needs to be sanitized again. Seriously, don't take this step lightly.

1. Mashing

Involves keeping your mash (the mixture of crushed, malted grains and water) at a specific temperature for a specific amount of time in order to transform the starch in the grains into simpler sugars that yeasts can digest. Some usual conditions would be 63-66 C (145-150 F) for one hour - these give a good balance of body and fermentability. More advanced brewers (or those posessing more advanced equipment) may do step mashes. The temperatures are selected in order to favour different enzymes present in the malt. A mash-out step is usually just heating the mash to 78 C (172 F) - this preserves just a bit of enzymatic activity - alpha-amylase (the one responsible for body) stops working around this temperature.

Regarding water:grain ratio, I personally use around 6 kg (12 lbs) to 23 L water (6 gal).

At the end of mashing, the liquid has to be separated from the solids by either transferring through a sieve (mash tun to boil kettle) or removing the solids (like the case for brew-in-a-bag or all-in-one systems - Braumeister, Grainfather).

2. Sparging

Sparging involves pouring water heated to the mash-out temperature over the spent grain in order to extract any lingering bit of sweetness that did not make it to the boil kettle. (I have no idea how you would do this when using brew-in-a-bag, though - edit: apparently you don't, problem solved :) ).

(Extract brewers will usually skip the steps above and just dissolve the extract in water then proceed to the boil)

3. Boiling

The purpose of boiling is two-fold. First, to remove dimethylsulfide, or DMS, a compound obtained during mashing that has a vegetable-like flavour usually undesireable in beer. The other purpose is to extract compounds from hops and convert them from alpha- (aromatic) to beta-acids (bitter) to provide bitterness, aroma, and preservative qualities to the beer. (It also concentrates the wort.)

Boiling usually takes 1 hour (as that is the amount of time that usually removes all the DMS). The boil can be longer if one wishes to concentrate the wort further.

Timing and quantities of hop additions are very important to the final hop flavour profile of the beer. The more hops are boiled, the more aroma they lose and the more they impart bitterness to your beer.

4. Chilling, transfer to fermenter and pitching yeast

Once the wort is done boiling, it is cooled (usually by applying cold water through a cooling implement - jacket or wort chiller), transferred to the fermenter and the yeast is added (or pitched). The simplest way of doing this is to add the dry yeast directly over the wort. Everything that touches wort after chilling must be sanitized (refer to step 0) - this includes the outside of the yeast packet before opening it.

Gravity readings (OG, original gravity) are taken of the cooled wort using a densimeter or refractometer.

5. Fermentation

The fermenter is placed in conditions adequate for the beer style being prepared and the yeast being used (lagers in cold conditions, ales a bit warmer, saisons or kveik yeasts in even warmer conditions) - check the yeast for information on temperatures, fitted with an airlock. When the airlock no longer significantly bubbles (or better yet, the gravity of the wort is where one would expect it to be based on recipe), fermentation is done. I just eyeball it and when I get 1-2 air bubbles / minute in the airlock, I declare it done. YMMV.

6. Bottling or kegging

Refer to step 0. Yes, sanitize all bottles. Sanitize that keg. Sanitize your hands and the racking cane. Then sanitize your hands again. Are your hands sanitary? Better do it again, just to make sure.

In order to get carbonation in the finished product, table sugar can be added based on style and carbonation preferences to the finished beer before bottling. The yeast left over in the solution will take care of the rest. A good starting point would be 4-5 g/L of table sugar (or 0.5 to 0.66 oz/gal). I usually add it as syrup made by dissolving the sugar in water, boiling, cooling (covered - refer to step 0) and mixing the whole sugar with the whole batch of beer. Then transfer to bottles or keg, and wait 1-2 weeks. Chill, and serve.

If kegging, you can also force carbonate by adding beer and pressurizing with carbon dioxide for about a week or so.

7. Cleaning

Cleaning and sanitizing are the most important steps in brewing. Clean equipment is easier to sanitize. Sanitized equipment is less likely to give you any contamination. While contamination can just sour your beer, it may also cause exploding bottles.

---

Some great advice from the comments:

On sanitation and RDWHAHB

---

Feedback is welcome, and will edit this post as required. Cheers!